A good article on the retail store side of Apple. Businessweek and TheStreet.com predicted miserable failure. They were very wrong. Apple stores are clearing more than $4k/sq ft/yr.

Quoted: "Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work," BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. "It's desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.," opined TheStreet.com. "I give [Apple] two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," predicted retail consultant David Goldstein.

This is an excellent article and reference list of links tracking the "future and history of the user interface." Highly recommended for designers or anyone who thinks their OS is superior to another OS.

This is the new bluetooth Mighty Mouse from Apple. I was dorking around with one in the Apple Store the other day and feeling like a moron because every time I clicked something I got a drop-down menu. I thought that thing was broken and then a helpful employee mentioned to me that this mouse actually has right and left click even though there are no buttons! That little tip seemed to help (but I still feel stupid).

They just ran a design contest where they challenged people to come up with a new look for Mac OS X. These are the winners. Click the images to see the other ones for each entry. The winner's is really nice.